Former CIA Officer Breaks Down Source Operations in Afghanistan | Delbert Roll
The Team House
dee takos
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2026
⏱️ 118 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The episode also covers covert action, counterintelligence, counter-WMD work, teaching at the Farm, CIA bureaucracy, writing after retirement, and the bizarre CIA gold bar scandal.
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"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"
00:00 — Start / Delbert Roll joins The Team House
01:10 — Growing up in Pennsylvania and joining the Army
07:06 — Third Special Forces Group, Africa missions, and comms work in the 1990s
15:09 — Leaving the Army and trying to join the FBI before the CIA
16:04 — Joining CIA three weeks before 9/11
21:09 — The day after 9/11 and CIA’s shift toward counterterrorism
23:46 — Moving from analyst to operations officer
25:20 — CIA training and “Ranger School for your brain”
30:42 — First Afghanistan tour and arriving at a forward operating base
33:22 — Running a source operation against a senior al-Qaeda target
39:13 — Building a targeting package without GPS coordinates
44:40 — Airstrike decision, protecting assets, and the target slipping away
48:54 — Working with JSOC and indigenous forces to shut down rat lines
52:47 — CIA support to conventional Army units in Afghanistan
56:17 — Language training, European posting, and traditional case officer work
01:04:25 — Covert action, liaison partners, and gathering intelligence through proxies
01:05:05 — Counterintelligence, recruiting foreign officers, and disrupting Russian operations
01:09:07 — Counter-WMD work and handling sources without being the technical expert
01:12:50 — Teaching at the Farm and training future CIA officers
01:22:29 — CIA bureaucracy, NSA comparisons, and publication review problems
01:27:58 — Recruiting, technology, and learning how to talk around classified subjects
01:28:57 — From CIA officer to fantasy, spy, and horror novelist
01:43:42 — CIA gold bars, non-traditional payments, and final thoughts
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey guys, I want to tell you tonight about my new novel, The Most Dangerous Man, |
| 0:05.6 | coming out June 9th. |
| 0:07.4 | I think, like a lot of you, I read in high school, the short story, The Greatest Game, |
| 0:13.3 | which is almost a century old at this point, but it's the classic premise of man-hunting man |
| 0:20.0 | for sport. |
| 0:21.6 | This book is based off of that a little bit, but also on stories that I have heard over the years about safari guides that have actually taken hunting parties, wealthy people, hunting poachers in West Africa. |
| 0:36.5 | That idea kind of cooked off in my mind when I was asked to |
| 0:40.9 | write a novel and get back into writing fiction again. And this book is about a Ranger with the |
| 0:46.3 | Ranger Reconnaissance Company who's on a mission in West Africa and gets kidnapped and hunted for sport |
| 0:52.2 | by a group of wealthy tech billionaires. |
| 0:55.2 | I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I think you'll have a good time reading it. |
| 0:59.5 | It's a quick, fast and furious, fast-paced action novel. |
| 1:05.6 | And I hope you all check it out. |
| 1:07.5 | It's up there. |
| 1:08.8 | You can find it wherever books are sold the hard copy uh the |
| 1:11.9 | hard back the soft cover and uh also the kindle ebook edition then we'll have some links down in the |
| 1:18.0 | description for you uh the book comes out june 9th and i hope you all let me know what you think of it. |
| 1:36.8 | Hey, folks, welcome to the team house. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest tonight, Delbert Roll. |
| 1:40.4 | Delbert served as a signals officer and an Army infantry officer in Third Special Forces Group. |
| 1:49.3 | He was a commo guy. |
| 1:51.2 | And then he made the jump over to the CIA for a short period of time. |
| 1:55.6 | He was an analyst and then transferred over and became an operations officer and had a whole 20 years career there doing |
... |
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